


things you said you’ll never forget

by AutisticWriter



Series: things you said [15]
Category: Deadman Wonderland
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood and Gore, Canon Disabled Character, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, During Canon, Eventual Happy Ending, Heavy Angst, Love, M/M, Mental Health Issues, One Shot, One-Sided Attraction, Paranoid Personality Disorder, Permanent Injury, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prompt Fic, Swearing, Trauma, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 11:53:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17745428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AutisticWriter/pseuds/AutisticWriter
Summary: A look at Ganta, his traumatic life in Deadman Wonderland, and his love for Senji.





	things you said you’ll never forget

When Igarashi Ganta was fourteen, he was sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit. After awaking in a classroom full of blood and the dismembered bodies of his classmates and getting something shoved into his chest by the person who murdered his friends, Ganta got hospitalised. But when he awoke, he got arrested for the murder of his classmates and got a rather shady lawyer and was forced to stand in a total farce of a trial. And… he was sentenced to death and sent to Deadman Wonderland, which is probably the biggest shithole in the whole of Japan.

Those months of his life were utter hell. Ganta found himself thrust into a world of death, gore and blood, and discovered that the action-packed races the public came to see weren’t just a show; if you entered a race to earn Cast Points, you risked your life and saw your fellow participants get ripped to shreds, poisoned and impaled all around you. He had to wear a collar that slowly and constantly injected him with poison, and needed to eat the foul-tasting candy that cost a fortune once every three days, or he would die. And all his fellow prisoners were thieves, thugs or both.

Things only changed when he found G Block. More specifically, Shiro (a friend he made whose existence came to truly fuck Ganta over when he realised just who she was and what she had done; even now, he cares about Shiro, but he never knows how to feel when he thinks about her) showed him the way, and he found himself in a world of Deadman and even more bloodshed. Ganta discovered that the weird powers he had shown twice before were caused by Branch of Sin, and that he was a Deadman. Ironically, despite G Block being a much tougher place than the main prison, he actually had a better time there.

Mainly because of who he met. He met Nagi and Karako, and… he met Senji.

Senji was like a light in the darkness to Ganta, and he just felt drawn to him like a moth to that light. Senji was the first person Ganta was forced to fight during Carnival Corpse, a memory that blurs in his mind due to the blood loss he experienced at the time. but he still remembers Senji slicing through his skin with his red blades and Ganta shooting blood projectiles at him, and Senji getting knocked out and Ganta going down seconds later. And he remembers… he remembers that penalty game.

To this day, he blames himself for what happened to Senji. The loser in Carnival Corpse, if still alive, had to go through the pentalty game, in which the sadistic exuse for a doctor would tie them to a chair and spin a fruit machine. And whatever it landed on, she would proceed to rip it from your body – and, if possible, without anaesthetic. And Senji… she took his left eye. Ganta still remembers the nausea and utter terror at having to watch the doctor incert a medical instrument into Senji’s eye and wrench his eyeball from his socket, blood spraying from the socket as truly horrific screams echoed from Senji’s mouth.

And after Ganta finished throwing up and fainting from the exhaustion and pain and terror, he dragged himself to his rival’s room. Senji lay on the bed, an eye patch covering his left eye socket and bruises from their fight patterning his exposed skin. Ganta (who was trying not to stare at Senji’s toned abs – looking back, this might have been the moment he realised he liked guys), almost started crying and wraped his arms around his injured torso and just said, “Senji, I… I’m so sorry.”

And Senji looked at him and frowned and said six words that Ganta thinks he will never forget: “Don’t apologise. You’re not to blame.”

And that… that was the epitome of why Ganta idolised Senji so much. This man… he didn’t hate Ganta for beating him in the fight and sending him to the penalty game. All Senji cared about was the bastards who made them fight in the first place. Ganta, Senji and everyone else in G Block were just pawns in a twisted master plan.

That was the moment in which their friendship truly formed, and Ganta proceeded to stick to Senji like glue for the rest of their time at Deadman Wonderland. As the weeks went by and he was forced into more and more fights during Carnival Corpse (Senji never lost a fight again, Nagi lost his left ear, Karako lost most of her liver and Ganta had sugery to remove one of his kidneys), Ganta started to realise that his idolisation of Senji wasn’t the admiration he had thought it was.

He realised he had a crush on Senji. Ganta didn’t tell Senji anything (as much as he wanted to kiss Senji, he didn’t want to freak him out by coming onto him when he was only fourteen), but he thought about his crush a lot – a lot. And he used to pray to whatever gods may have existed that Senji wasn’t going to die. Senji was the reason life in this shithole was bearable, and Ganta didn’t know if he could survive without him.

After all the shit he had been through during those few months (months that felt like decades thanks to the terror and trauma and pain they caused), Ganta felt he deserved at least some happiness. Didn’t he?

\---

Thankfully, they both survived. Thanks to the work of everyone, the prisoners of G Block managed to escape and the shithole prison was shut down for breaking basically every protocol on the book. And, as almost everyone in G Block was either innocent or their crimes had been greatly exaggerated, they were allowed to get their normal lives back. Well, as normal as they could get when almost everyone had PTSD and they were permanently scarred by their experiences at Deadman Wonderland, both physically and mentally.

Ganta, for one, has struggled to get his life back. His life was snatched away from him at the age of fourteen, a time when you are still growing and developing, and his traumatic experiences ended up shaping his brain in ways he didn’t know possible. At the age of sixteen, he got diagnosed with PTSD, but that didn’t surprise him (he had been having nightmares about the Wretched Egg and the deaths of his friends almost every night for two years). What surprised him was the diagnosis of Paranoid Personality Disorder. It turns out that being around people out to torture and slaughter him at a time when his brain was still developing led to a personality disorder, one based around paranoia and having severe trust issues. It’s difficult to deal with, but his meds are helping.

And… Ganta never tells Senji how he feels about him. Maybe he just doesn’t want to ruin their friendship, or maybe he just doesn’t feel like he’s ever going to be able to have a relationship after the trauma he went through. Whatever the reason, he doesn’t tell Senji. But he still loves him.

As fucked up as he is, Ganta knows one thing for certain: Senji helped him through the worst time in his life, and he will always love him.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want me to write you a short fic, drop in a prompt at my [personal prompt meme](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/AutisticWriters_Personal_Prompt_Meme)!


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